The news of the detection of a huge equatorial plasma bubble (EPB) over the Giza pyramid in Egypt would have gone unnoticed in the media except for one detail: the detection was made from Earth, and not from space as is usually the case, and by a Chinese ionospheric radar, located more than 8,000 kilometers away, on the island of Hainan, in the South China Sea.
The study on the feat, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, highlights that it is the first time that a low-latitude radar, in this case the Low Latitude Long-Range Ionospheric Radar (known in English by the acronym LARID), has been able to track global EPBs in real time.
Plasma bubbles are regions of the Earth’s ionosphere that form at low latitudes due to the separation between areas of different densities. So when a denser layer of plasma overlaps a less dense layer, the result is the formation of these hollow structures that can grow hundreds of kilometers across, and interfere with GPS signals and satellite communications.
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The news of the detection of a huge equatorial plasma bubble (EPB) over the Giza pyramid in Egypt would have gone unnoticed in the media except for one detail: the detection was made from Earth, and not from space as is usually the case, and by a Chinese ionospheric radar, located more than 8,000 kilometers away, on the island of Hainan, in the South China Sea.
The study on the feat, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, highlights that it is the first time that a low-latitude radar, in this case the Low Latitude Long-Range Ionospheric Radar (known in English by the acronym LARID), has been able to track global EPBs in real time.
Plasma bubbles are regions of the Earth’s ionosphere that form at low latitudes due to the separation between areas of different densities. So when a denser layer of plasma overlaps a less dense layer, the result is the formation of these hollow structures that can grow hundreds of kilometers across, and interfere with GPS signals and satellite communications.